Subscribe to this blog

Receive Updates by Email

Search This Blog

Three Rules for Innovation Teams

Our
business at Continuum is design and innovation (if you've used a Swiffer or
pushed a new Target shopping cart, you've encountered us), so naturally we are
always looking for ways to innovate how we innovate. Three refinements to our
team approach are making a difference: actively managing creative friction;
making project rooms the focal point of the work environment; and pushing as
much creativity into commercialization as into conceptualization. Follow these
rules, and you'll see a dramatic difference in your own team's ability to
innovate:

1.
Manage Creative Friction

The
wrong type of friction on teams makes people hate each other and hold back, but
the right type gets results. How do you encourage good creative friction?

Share
the experience. The whole team, including the client, work together through all
steps of the ideation process from consumer learning, to analysis of
possibilities, to envisioning the final idea. Working with consumers directly
to understand their needs and aspirations is an especially powerful bonding
experience that gives the team a common sense of purpose, and creates a shared
foundation of facts and feelings.

Remove
communication barriers. People communicate in different ways, so we do social
styles analyses to help people understand how their teammates tend to
communicate. Are they a driver, amiable, expressive or analytical? They learn
that it is not that Harry is necessarily overbearing, but that he tends to lead
with ideas, it is not that Susan isn't on task, but she tends to consider
people first. Once you understand why people are different, you can laugh about
it — rather than get frustrated — and it becomes a way for the team to bond,
rather than a reason for breakdown.

Have
at it. Lock yourselves in the project room and engage in a passionate debate.
The magic in innovation is to combine perception with analysis. Few people can
do this alone, but a well-functioning team can be prolifically creative and
sharply critical at the same time. The team as a whole acts like one open and
self-aware brain that is creating and arguing with itself at the same time. The
communication is fast and brutally honest and there is only one agenda.

2.
Bring Creativity to the Center

The
forum for this debate is the project room. This is a dedicated space teams use
from conception to execution. Of course project rooms should be good a place to
work, with natural light, plenty of space for the whole team and what they are
working on, lots of pinup space for the voice of the consumer to come alive in
the room, whiteboards for new ideas, and good audio and video connections to
team members in other parts of the world. A well-designed space helps the team
to stay focused.

But
the project room should not isolate the team. It should connect it to the
company as a whole: Glass doors and big internal windows enable more people to
see what is going on, comment on it, add to it, and appreciate it.

And
put project rooms at the center of action in the company. In many companies,
project rooms are set up in the low-rent district of their buildings. I hate to
admit it, but many of our project rooms at Continuum were kind of pokey, too.
So we moved our executives out of their offices and turned those spaces into
project rooms. Since innovation is the core of our proposition, it should be at
the core of our environment, too.

Project
rooms don't belong in the basement; give them some respect. Move the CEO out of
his office and make that a project room.

3.
Stand for Delivery

Innovation
doesn't stop once you have an idea. Innovation is the creation and the delivery
of new value. There is also the challenge in getting those ideas to market. At
some point the ideation team has to hand off to the commercialization team
which is responsible for the later stages of the innovation process:
development, production, training, etc. And that handoff can go wrong. The
commercialization team may not fully believe in the idea, and if their heart is
not in it, nor is their mind. But more insidiously, the commercialization team
may be too uncritical and launch the idea exactly as conceived. This is the
biggest trap. When we look at successful innovation, yes, the product or
service as launched is similar to the original idea. But it is not identical.

So
design teams with this handoff in mind. Make sure that there is an extended
team of stakeholders who have responsibility for the entire innovation process.
And make sure there is at least one person from the commercialization team who
starts off in the ideation team. They will feel ownership of the idea, and more
importantly, having been part of the deliberation process in the conception
phase, will be more comfortable continuing to creatively evolve the idea in the
right way as it is commercialized.

Sometimes
the difference between the idea and the reality is small, but as my friend
Beatriz Lara, Chief Innovation Officer of BBVA likes to point out, the
difference between the DNA of a chimpanzee and a human is less than 1%, but it
is an important 1%.

Successful
ideas are not born in secret: they emerge from open and vigorous dialog around
new information, and then they are actively pulled into the market by a
commercialization team rather than being pushed by an ideation team. In the
intensity of the innovation process, it's easy to divide into a world of
"us" and "them." But to innovate well, teams must be
permeable, inviting the outside in and engaging the broader community to
transform an idea on a napkin into a new product or service in the marketplace.

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

Popular posts from this blog

You are surrounded by dangerous WOMBATS.
They’re everywhere. Sometimes they hide in plain sight, easy to spot. Other times they are well camouflaged, requiring heightened awareness to identify them. You need to stay alert, it’s important to avoid them. WOMBATs resemble ordinary, productive tasks. However, they are vampires for time and resources, weapons of mass distraction.WOMBATs are seductive. Working on a WOMBAT feels productive.WOMBATs are bad for your career.WOMBATs are bad for your business.WOMBATs infiltrate your work day (and your personal time). Strike them down.WOMBATs may be be ingrained in your company culture: “We’ve always done it that way…” WOMBAT Metamorphosis Alert: A task or project that wasproductive in the pastcanevolve into a WOMBAT in today's environment.Your comfort zone is populated with WOMBATs.More on comfort zones, here.Some people are WOMBATs in disguise. Stay away from them, they are vampire WOMBATs.If you don’t control your WOMBATs, your WOMBATs will…

Phyllis Korkki, an assignment editor at The New York Times, visited the garment district in Manhattan to interview designers as part of a story for the newspaper’s Snapchat account. Credit George Etheredge/The New York Times What Could I Possibly Learn From A Mentor Half My Age? Plenty.

How on earth did I become an “older worker?”

It was only a few years ago, it seems, that I set out to climb the ladder in my chosen field. That field happens to be journalism, but it shares many attributes with countless other workplaces. For instance, back when I was one of the youngest people in the room, I was helped by experienced elders who taught me the ropes.

Now, shockingly, I’m one of the elders. And I’ve watched my industry undergo significant change. That’s why I recently went searching for a young mentor — yes, a younger colleague to mentor me.

The term 'Do It Yourself' has turned into a phenomenon over the past decade and is continuing to gain momentum, especially in the fashion industry. From interactive design stations at Topshop, to custom shoes at Jimmy Choo, every level of the fashion industry is dipping their toes into the pools of DIY.

"Many industry insiders think it is just the beginning. Ask about the future of fashion, and the answer that is likely to come back (along with the importance of Instagram and the transformation of shows into entertainment) is personalization," says Vanessa Friedman from the New York Times.